The release of Visual Studio Service Pack 1, seems to have created a lot of interest – rightfully so – about time all those annoying bugs with VS05 are fixed. If you have not seen it then go and get the Service Pack 1 – it is a hefty install coming in at approx. 431 mb.
Running on XP/2003:
Although I did not have to do this myself I know some colleagues who had a problem installing the SP1 where the installation was interrupted with an error saying “Error 1718. File FileName was rejected by digital signature policy.”. This happens if there is insufficient contiguous memory to verify the MSI’s signature. To work around that situation you need to change this policy. To do so check out KB 925336 from Microsoft.
Running on Vista:
If you are running Vista then you also need to get the SP1 Vista Update after you have downloaded and install the SP1 mentioned above. On installing this on Vista you need to ensure the following:
- UAC is switched *ON*
- You have the SP1 bits (the 431 mb download) available.
- Run the Vista update bits as admin (right-click and select “Run as Administrator”)
If you don’t have the above Vista update installed it might still work fine (I have not noticed any issues, but I have not used each and every aspect of Visual Studio 2005 in Vista, so there might be some surprises). I do get the following warning when running this without the update:
(Click on the image to see the full size)
Alternatively, you should think about slipstreaming the VS 2005 SP1 package as that will save loads of time (especially if you are in a development team or have multiple machines to install this on). Also note, you might not be able to fit the MSDN Library files on the same DVD as the file size comes in at a pretty big 3.2 gb!
If you are not sure what is slipstreaming, it essentially means to combine the bits of an original distribution and a subsequent release (such as a service pack) into one package which effectively results in the updated set of bits.
On a tangent, if you are running XP and each time you install that you need to install SP2 separately then you might want to slipstream that into one package as shown by Paul Thurrot here step by step.
